3 Replies to “Tweet the Dust: Celebrate author John Fante tonight at the Hammer”

I admire Fante and added several of his titles to an L.A. novel curriculum a few years back but for the life of me I never understood Bukowski’s fawning adoration of the man and his work. The biggest stumbling block, for me, is Fante/Bandini’s monstrous, out of control ego. Quite unlike his number one fan, Bukowski, Fante had an insatiable hunger for fame and was, in his later years, toxicly bitter that it didn’t come his way when he was above ground. I came away from my study of Fante wishing he had written more whimsical and grounded pieces like the hilarious and touching My Dog Stupid. But the man deserves props for making the L.A. novel a viable literary genre when the east coast fops were denying that such a mythical creature existed.